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I've previously posted on the Motte about the state-funded Swedish Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility. Recently the Committee released its second report more closely detailing the root cause of the decline – which women are not having children anymore? As before here's a link in case you know the Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-2-fran-hoga-till-sjunkande-fruktsamhetstal-hur-ser-situationen-i-sverige-ut/
The focus of this report is a lot narrower than the previous one which means there are fewer fun takeaways. Two facts stand out. There's been a lot of speculation about coupling not working, people delaying childrearing so they are unable to get that third child, et cetera, but the report doesn't bear any of these concerns out. Men and women are still moving in together, but the major driver of the decline is that there's a growing cohort in which the couple never decides to have kids. A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be. This fact is concerning because I have a suspicion it has a strong potential to rapidly initiate a self-replicating demographic spiral. DINKs have more resources compared to DICKs, and if more people choose to stay DINKs then life for DICKs will probably become even harder, which in turn will lead to even fewer DICKs. I think the carrot for DICKs probably won't be enough here: society probably also needs to put a dent in the wallet of the DINKs, maybe throught some tax scheme, to encourage more childrearing.
Beyond that the report also has a few tidbits of interest here and there. The common narrative of a foreign underclass quickly and decisively outbreeding the native population isn't quite on the mark for example, as the report points out that second-generation immigrants tend to have about as many children as natives (first-generation is another story, and a large part of the very justifiable demographic anxiety in Europe). On the other hand that also means immigration cannot possibly solve the issue long term or even medium term; while many children of immigrants often learn Swedish quite poorly, commit more crimes than average and remain largely unintegrated for vast periods of time, they at least seem to take our individualistic childless culture to heart.
This is less meaty than the previous post on the subject, but I think that's enough to bring some fodder for discussion. What do you think should be done to support our DICKs? Should DINKs be made to pay to make their lives easier? Is the reports take naive on the questions of immigration and demography?
In my eyes there is a simple explanation for dropping birth rates, which all these reports fastidiously ignore: adult life without children has continuously gotten more fun, while adult life with children has at best remained about the same, and the millennial generation is the one for which the enjoyableness of the former has finally conclusively overtaken the latter. We are in fact the first generation in the West to have completely shed the taboo on adults engaging in frivolous play outside of a handful of sanctioned categories that can be seen as healthy or the like, which I am occasionally reminded of when my mother asks me on the phone what I have been up to and I slip up and mention some game I tried whereupon she inevitably switches to a tone of anger and disgust and reminds me of my age.
If you want people to have children again, you either need to find a way to feed adults with children comparable amounts of dopamine to what is available to those without, or ban the whole spectrum of international pleasure travel (outside of boring package holidays priced so you can afford them once a year), escape rooms, hip restaurants, Tiktok trends and Steam accounts for the over-25.
I do think that there are small things that could be done on the margin that are related to the above while not being quite as drastic, but these still would require sacrifices from a people very used to having its cake and eating it too: most significantly, removing most of the relatively novel legislation that is purported to enhance the safety of children but gets in the way of the parents' dopamine acquisition, such as mandatory child seats in cars, legally required supervision, or liability for harm done to or by unsupervised children. It should be permissible once again to put five year olds on the laps of their 12 year old siblings in the back of your car, and let them roam the streets freely when the parents want a break from them, as was the case for me growing up; and if they climb a tree and fall down, or get injured in a car crash, that ought to be considered tragic but not intrinsically treated as someone's legal fault.
Day in the life before kids
Day in the life after kids:
The "before" is probably a little tight since you're at six hours of sleep assuming it takes an hour to get dinner. You might have to cut down to an hour or two of vidya every day. Otherwise accurate.
Speedrun some counter service fast casual slop near the office or home to get that number down.
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"Day in the life before kids" rather sounds like the day in the life of an unemployed trust fund kid.
The second item is literally "work"
You can totally do all those things while having an 8 hour per day wageslave job. Of course that's assuming no overtime but there's a ton of jobs that end after 8 hours.
Yea I basically lived that life for a decade:
Woke up @11 Worked 12-815 Video games / reading / movies for 2-3 hours Worked out 11-1 somewhere in there Jerked off Sleep @2-3ish
I changed the schedule up just enough here and there with real human interaction, but 5 days a week this was me.
I can kinda see how Jim Norton jerked himself off enough to marry a tranny. Two years with mostly normal sexual thoughts now.
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